GPU: The Founders on Today's America

PSoTD (by way of Steve) asks: "How do you think the founding fathers would decide on the hot button issues of today?"

There are so many hot button issues, but of course I'll cut to the chase to discuss a bit about the gay thing.

There are those who point to George Washington as the original justifier of excluding gay men from service. In 1778, the Continental Army tried Lt. Frederick Gotthold Enslin for sodomy and making a false report. He was convicted, and Washington ordered him drummed out of the Army, never to return. Of Washington, the day's orders say, "His Excellency the Commander in Chief approves the sentence and with Abhorrence and Detestation of such Infamous Crimes."

Pretty harsh, right? A soldier in Washington's army propositions another soldier and is sent back to Ohio in infamy. It would seem so, but for a real understanding of this case it's necessary to consider the nascent nation at the time.

Connecticut applied the death penalty to people convicted of sodomy, including homosexuals, until reformers in 1821 changed the penalty to mere life imprisonment. Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and the Carolinas all imposed the death penalty for sodomy during at least portions of the colonial period. There is no trend of more lenient legal status to those convicted of sodomy as time progressed towards the Revolution, just a snaggle of punitive laws that darted back and forth between death and sometimes lengthy imprisonment.

Pennsylvania is a case in point. A Quaker colony to begin with, it went back and forth on punishments for sodomy. Sometimes the death penalty was in force, other times less severe punishments were levied for homosexuals and sodomites. Rhode Island similarly had various approaches, which sometimes included the death penalty in the Colonial period. Virginia reaffirmed the death penalty for sodomy in a 1792 law that succeeded English Common Law.

Interestingly, Georgia is the only one of the original colonies that did not criminalize sodomy in the colonial period. Sodomy wasn't criminalized until 1817.

In light of the fact that twelve of the thirteen colonies for which Washington led an Army criminalized the type of conduct that Lt. Enslin was convicted of, and many at that time punished such conduct with the death penalty, I have a hard time seeing how anyone believes this case shows Washington's strict disapproval of homosexuals. By today's standards, if a General took a far more lenient approach to homosexuality than the states themselves did and then ran for president, he'd be tarred and feathered by right wing zealots.

So how would the Founders land on the hot button issues surrounding gay civil liberties in America?

I think that they believed their rhetoric. Yes, a number of the founders owned slaves, but by all accounts they also disapproved of the practice. They built a country, after all, that could not long sustain the practice of human bondage. My feeling is that the men who waged war for a nation founded on the principle of consent of the governed would frown on attempts to marginalize and restrict legal equality for gays and lesbians.

We have historical evidence that the Indispensible Man had no interest in pursuing excessive punishment against homosexuals, even when he had the chance to act out any revulsion he may have felt. I don't know of such compelling incidents for the rest, but Washington I think would be on the right side with gay rights.

It could also be noted that the architect of the modern training regime of the Continental Army, the Prussian Baron von Steuben was a gay man.